These walls can speak, actually.
That’s the thought that crosses my mind as I travel from to room to room with the vacuum cleaner, sucking up the debris of the last week and a half (don’t judge) and wishing I was doing something else.
This past spring, when we were all hunkered down at home and anxiously awaiting a bit of good news about the Covid-19 pandemic, I often found peace just outside my back door.
I’m a homebody, for sure. A gardening homebody, on top of that. But it’s been many years since I made it a near-daily springtime practice to wander around my yard and check up on the progress of all the growing things.
I haven’t made it an official goal or anything, but it seems 2020 has gradually become The Year of Trying New Things for me.
I’ve written about some of that here, and I hope to continue the conversation in the coming months.
This week, though, I’m trying something new in this space—I’m joining a linkup hosted by blogger Heather Gerwing that encourages writers to share “Four Somethings” from the past month.
I don’t know if this will become a regular feature or something I post only when the mood hits. Either way, it’s been fun to come up with this first list of something loved, something read, something treasured and something ahead.
When it comes to places to live, Kansas is not very glamorous. Nobody has ever said, “Wow, I bet it’s beautiful there,” or “I’ve always wanted to live there,” when they find out where my home is.
I get it. I’ve been around the country, and Kansas is a bit boring compared with the rest of the states. One thing I do love about living here, though, is the fact that we have four distinct seasons.
There it was, in the subject line of a promotional email from the photo company we’d used to print Lilly’s senior pictures: “Don’t forget about dad.”
The timing made sense, given that Father’s Day was less than two weeks away. But when I read it, I couldn’t escape the irony.
Last week, I wrote about metaphorical wake-up calls—how they don’t have an expiration date, and how responding to mine involves learning to be OK with not knowing how the story is going to end.
I don’t have a tried-and-true strategy for doing this, of course. But right around the time I decided to get serious about confronting this life-long struggle, I also started tackling some projects that I’ve always wanted to do but never had the gumption to try.
Surprisingly, the process of doing that is helping me answer my wake-up call.
For example, I decided this was the year that we were finally going to dig up, divide and replant a large-but-rapidly declining patch of ornamental grass that anchors the front corner of our house.